Two Straight Hair Selkirk Rex cats, a brother and sister from the same litter, are crowned King Cat and Queen Cat by Winter Carnival royalty at the Saintly City Cat Club's 38th Annual Championship Cat Show at Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul on Sunday, January 26, 2014. At left, "King Clone Commander Keller", and at right "Little Bear", both belonging to Cory and Karen Hovland and their son Matt Overholser of Pine City, Mn., are given cat-sized capes, crowns and medals during a ceremony at the end of the two-day cat show. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

Tiny little capes and hats await the winners of the "King Cat" and "Queen Cat" competition at the Saintly City Cat Club's 38th Annual Championship Cat Show at Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul on Sunday, January 26, 2014. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

73-year-old Flo Dougherty runs one of her latest cat capes for the 2015 Saintly City Cat Show through her sewing machine at her home in White Bear Lake on Friday, February 7, 2014. Dougherty has crafted the outfits for the winners of the annual cat show for the past seven years out of cloth, bells and empty cat food cans. (Pioneer Press: John Brewer)

Before the Cat Internet Video Festival, before Grumpy Cat, even before Keyboard Cat, there was the Saintly City Cat Show — a pageant tied in with the St. Paul Winter Carnival that features hundreds of cats, a half-dozen judges and just one king and one queen, draped in luxurious capes and crowns.

“We kind of use it as a climax of the show, the outfits. It adds a bit of excitement,” show manager Linda Mae Baker said.

The capes and crowns have been around as long as the show, since the early 1970s. And while they are a highlight of the festivities, fastened to the winning felines by Boreas Rex and his queen, few knew who put them together.

Until now.

The first seamstress to make them was a Cottage Grove cat breeder who showed blue Persians with her husband. The couple eventually dropped out of the club.

Baker then recruited a friend from a china painting class to make the capes. She put them together for a few years but eventually was sidelined by illness. So Baker turned to a woman she met while working at a nursing home.

Flo Dougherty of White Bear Lake already had helped out with the show: typing the pageant’s catalog before word-processing programs were commonplace, taking tickets at the gate and sewing rosettes, the ruffled ribbons cats get when they place in the show.

“She’s one of those people where if there’s a need, she jumps in and helps,” Baker said.

Dougherty, a soft-spoken 73-year-old who works in the Como Park Zoo gift shop, picked up her sewing skills as a 4-H kid in Ohio.

“I’m from Circleville, home of the greatest show on Earth — the Pumpkin Show,” she said, adding that her brother-in-law once grew a 1,600-pound specimen.

“I started with tea towels, then embroidery towels, outfits, winter coats. I moved on up to making shirts, blouses, slacks.”

When it was her turn to craft cat clothes for the annual cat show, Dougherty picked up a sample cape and patterns from the previous seamstress before getting to work. She still has the sample and the patterns.

“People who know how to sew probably think this is boring,” Dougherty said.

But to the approximately 6,000 folks who visit the show this year, the outfits are a big deal.

“You’d be surprised at how many people come up to the judges’ table and take pictures of them,” Baker said.

And once the winners — the highest-scoring male and female from the house cat division — are announced, they’re draped with Dougherty’s creations.

Do they like it?

“Well, um, if you saw the expression on the male’s face, he was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ He wasn’t real impressed,” Baker said. “The queen was like, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

If they knew the work that went into the outfits — the five to six hours per cape, the empty can of Fancy Feast hidden in each crown to give it shape — maybe they’d crack a smile.

But probably not.

“Once we had a king who decided to jump off the table and ran over to a row of cages and decided to jump into an open one,” she said. “Then we had a cat loose for three days.”

For Dougherty, who hasn’t owned a cat in more than 20 years, crafting the finery is just another way to help out a friend.

Plus, she likes seeing the cats dressed up.

“I’ve started putting bells on the ribbon to see how they play with it,” she said.

Then there’s the fact Baker doesn’t want to find another seamstress.

“We’ll keep Flo doing it as long as we can. She does such a beautiful job,” she said. “The people just love it.”

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